An ongoing review of politics and culture

The development of a carbon tax or other emissions abatement regime will be entirely rational, as evidenced by the lack of an enormous transfer of economic value to corn farmers in advance of the Iowa caucuses:

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I look forward to your argument that we should disband the military because of all the pork in the defense budget.

I’m being glib, but only a slightly. As you know, climate change is a problem. It’s possibly* a really big problem. The argument that we can’t or shouldn’t address it because some of the money might be misspent just doesn’t seem very serious or interesting.

* In all of these discussions, words like “possibly” do a lot of work. Here I define possibly as “sufficiently likely that for this and a host of other reasons, we ought to decarbonize the economy over the next 50 or so years.” If you don’t agree with that definition, then all this handwringing over how the money will be allocated is kind of disingenuous.

I agree with a lot of what you say. This is meant only as an example to address the argument that a Pigou carbon tax can be a “free lunch” because it would only shift taxes from income to carbon emissions. I go into why I think this is naive in this post.

On the broader question of what “possibly” means in this context, my perspective in spelled out in this long post.